Was Uhud a Victory or a Loss?

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

It is common to describe Uḥud simply as a Muslim defeat, and by the single measure of casualties, this is undeniable: the Quraysh lost 22 men, the Muslims lost roughly 70, three times as many. But Dr. Qadhi argues that casualty count is only one way to measure victory and loss, and by nearly every other measure, Uḥud does not read as a Qurayshi win:

- Goals. The Muslim objective was simply to defend Madinah from being overrun; this was achieved. The Qurayshi objective was to obliterate the Muslim community; this failed completely.

- The opening phase. The Muslims routed the Quraysh outright at the start of the battle, it was the Qurayshi lines, including their own women, that broke and fled first.

- Who held the field. By the classical standard of who remains on the battlefield and who is forced to leave it, the Muslims held their ground; it was the Quraysh who withdrew.

- Prisoners of war. The Muslims took one prisoner (Abū ʿAzzah); the Quraysh took none.

- Pursuit. The Quraysh did not pursue the Muslims afterward, the Muslims pursued them, camping at Ḥamrāʾ al-Asad for three days to make sure the Quraysh had genuinely left.

- The trade route. The underlying economic problem that drove the Quraysh to war in the first place, the interdicted Syria trade route, remained entirely unresolved.

Dr. Qadhi also cites Ibn al-Qayyim's observation in Mukhtaṣar Zād al-Maʿād: even the Qurayshi side's own internal debate on the retreat, ʿIkrimah's complaint that "we haven't impressed our young ladies yet", betrays that even they did not consider it a genuine triumph.

The conclusion: Uḥud was not a clean Muslim victory, but neither was it a clean Qurayshi one, an uneven engagement in which the Muslims did not achieve everything they might have, but the Quraysh achieved almost nothing of what they set out to do. As ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb told Abū Sufyān directly on the battlefield: "Laysū sawāʾ, qatlānā fi-l-jannati wa qatlākum fi-n-nār", they are not equal; our dead are in Jannah and your dead are in the Fire. The only unambiguous loss at Uḥud is measured in lives, not in outcome.